Business development and personal finance

Social sales – extend your reach

Recently term ‘social sales’ have come to a spotlight. This week LinkedIn and HootSuite organized a webinar on the subject which was really easy to follow on HootSuite and twitter as well under hash tag #salesissocial.

What is a social sale? Social sale can be defined as a sales where sales person is informed about the person it is trying to sell to and tries to deliver a custom-fit solution, product or service for him or her. Social changes the sales games – allows us to customize the information we are delivering!

I suppose that it is hard to find a person involved in business who does not know what is LinkedIn, Twitter of Facebook however companies are still in the early adoption cycle in using social media in their sales. And even more sales force’s still have little understanding of social media according to data presented in webinar.

Social selling salespeople are becoming ‘micro-marketers’ within their trusted networks. Trust, interest in the person you are selling to and involvement are keywords to describe social sales.

Platforms or places for social sales to happen are unlimited however taking into account LinkedIn findings the leading tool for social sales is LinkedIn, second – Twitter. Social sales can happen everywhere where there are at least two involved but by joining LinkedIn or Twitter we, of course, increase our scope and chances of selling.

3 principles of becoming social sales pro: Permanent beta, I in power of we, breakout. Few advices that I would like to share:

No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.

The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be.

Use social information to deepen the account & enhance contacts points to leverage throughout the sales cycle.